Development of high speed continuous transport critical current measurement system for long piece of HTS conductor

Abstract

In case of long pieces of HTS conductor, their critical current measurement is an important process for the conductor manufacturer and the customer, however, it is very time consuming process. Conventional critical current measurement is carried out by ‘four probe method’, which increase the transport current and measure the voltage between the fixed voltage taps. Therefore, it consists of conductor moving and measuring process. To speed up the measuring process, longer distance between voltage taps is required. In this case, the measured critical current is averaged and small defects, which can be very crucial for thermal stability, cannot be found. Therefore, the limitation of the voltage tap length should be carefully decided considering the cooling environment. Another non-contact or indirect method is to measure the screening effect of magnetic field and converting the field signal to the critical current, which is called as hall probe method. This process is known as a very efficient way to find local defects and estimate the distribution of the critical current, however, it contains inevitable error and noise because it should measure the small magnetic field signals.This paper describes a new critical current measurement system, which have similar hardware structure of conventional ‘four probe method’. However, it is much faster than other systems using fast feedback control of the transport current while the conductor is continuously moving with high speed. The measured results are compared with the conventional method and hall probe method.